Learn Blockchain

Created on: October 26, 2018

Updated on: January 06, 2019

Imagine you are 8 years old and you are living at home and you and a few friends want to go around the corner to your local sweet shop.

Later on, you join a few friends and you all go to the shop to buy them, and you buy a pack of rhubarb and custard sweets. Mmm these were truly scrumptious back in the day. These used to be on sale in jars, who remembers the pick and mix counter at Woolworths?

Well you ate a couple of them and you developed stomach ache. This stomach ache goes on for a few hours and eventually you start foaming at the mouth and then you collapse on the floor.

Your parents call the ambulance and then you go straight to hospital. The hospital carries out a number of tests and they find out that the sweets you consumed contained bleach and this was the main reason why you collapsed after eating them.

This is shocking stuff because you have been going to this sweet shop for a couple of years and this is the first time that this has happened.

Your parents have been stricken with worry and they can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. Your mum tells you that you are not allowed to go to that shop ever again and you try explaining that it isn’t your fault. The elephant in the room is the fact that this shop supplied these sweets and you bought and consumed these sweets in good faith. Perhaps there was a contaminated batch, in this case the sweet shop if they had known about it they could have removed this batch from general sale.

This scenario didn’t happen during my childhood however it is a prime example of where an organisation has failed it consumers.

Over the past 10 years post 2008 we have witnessed a crisis in terms of trust in people and an in organisations. The banking crash of 2008 has shaken the confidence of the wider public all around the world. In some countries, some of the banks were nationalised and yet they are still supposed to be working for the public interest. This is a prime example of what happens on paper and what occurs in reality.

There has to be a leaner more accountable way of running organisations or institutions and this is one of the many reasons why Satoshi Nakamoto created the blockchain as a means to embed trust in to our business relationships and transactions.

The #blockchain is a modern-day response to the lack of #integrity that is woefully lacking within our transactions and institutions. If you take a look at how the big banks are structured you will know that the systems that you use to carry out day to day banking are centralised. One of the ways in which these banks have been able to spread the load so as to say is that you can spread multiple copies of these centralised servers in to the cloud. It doesn’t resolve the problem of over centralisation however it is a convenient workaround to it.

We will explore the benefits and disadvantages of centralisation in a forthcoming blogpost.

The blockchain revolution is a humanistic way of building long, lasting relationships that resonate with people from all walks of life.